The one thing that Democrats and Republicans have in common these days is nostalgia for a pre-Obama era.

[And that's especially true after Obama delivered us his Selma speech on the America he sees! TM ]

The leading candidates of both parties serve as shorthand for a time before the era of Obama. The last names Bush and Clinton summon up nostalgic visions of their family’s previous administrations.

The Bush and Clinton political express is moving forward not because these families have become dynasties, but because the majority of Americans want to go back to a time before Obama.

Hillary and Jeb are not popular on their own merits. To Democrats, Hillary seems to offer a return to the Bill Clinton days when the economy was up and the country didn’t hate them. To Republicans, Jeb seems to offer a way back to the clearer issues of the Bush years when domestic politics had been temporarily taken off the table. After two terms of Obama’s unfiltered left-wing radicalism on domestic and foreign policy, the potential matchup will return to the triangulation of the Bush-Clinton years with Jeb adopting liberal ideas on domestic policy to appeal to Democrats and Hillary pretending to take a tougher stance on foreign policy and national defense to appeal to Republicans.

The combination may be a nightmare for conservatives, but they need to understand the source of its appeal. Americans desperately want to erase the entire miserable Obama era from history.

There have been dynasties in American politics before, but none of them were driven by this degree of escapism. Americans are not looking to the future. Polls show that they no longer expect the future to bring them a better life. Instead they are nostalgic for a better past. They want the nineties back. They even want the last decade back.

There is no better sign of how miserable Obama’s two terms in office have been than that the last names Clinton and Bush now induce nostalgia, rather than anger. That’s true even among many people of the opposing party. The passing of time has made the Clinton and Bush years seem like a better era.

Conservatives who want to move the country to the right are not just battling the establishment. Much of the country wants to magically return to the way things were without any more conflict. Instead of actually undoing what Obama did, they want to chant “Bush” and “Clinton” to instantly turn back time.

Obama shattered the embryonic Third Way politics that both parties had come to rely on after the Cold War. The radical left has been met by a resurgent conservatism. The old way of doing things in which the Republicans gradually gave ground and the Democrats gradually took it was overturned. The left has shown that it can blow through the legal structures to implement a radical agenda and get away with it. The right has realized that compromising their way to victory is a formula for a permanent defeat.snipBush and Clinton tap into the country’s emotional need for stability, but its practical need is for change. The underlying debate of the Obama years that we never had was about the relationship between the people and the government. And that is a debate that the country desperately needs to have.The establishment candidates agree on tilting the balance of power between government and the individual further toward government. The radical left agrees. What’s missing is a candidate who believes in shifting the balance of power away from the government and toward the people.

Without that, there is no way back to pre-Obama times. Instead we’ll continue losing our freedoms and our republic to the expanding power of a vast incompetent state.

A traumatized nation wants to return to a pre-Obama era, but there is no way back without undoing the things that he did. If a candidate of change fails to make Americans understand that, then a decade from now they will nostalgically recall the Obama years and wish that they could go back to those wonderful days.

"Our problem is not the Islamic radical, but the inherent radicalism of Islam. Islam is a radical religion. It radicalizes those who follow it. Every atrocity we associate with Islamic radicals is already in Islam. The Koran is not the solution to Islamic radicalism, it is the cause."